


Inflorescence

by doublejoint



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, plant people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 15:55:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29935815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: [plantman!Shanks AU]Is there a difference, besides the way it feels to say it on one’s tongue, between sentimentality and keeping things that make one look periodically backwards?
Relationships: Akagami no Shanks | Red-Haired Shanks/Dracule Mihawk
Kudos: 5





	Inflorescence

**Author's Note:**

> [Persicaria maculosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persicaria_maculosa) is also known as redshank. 
> 
> brief sexual content (human/plant person)

“Aww, you got a place with good soil for me?” says Shanks.

He slips his feet out of his sandals and buries them in the fresh dirt, leaning back on the bench. 

“Hardly,” says Mihawk.

White roots unfurl from the soles of Shanks’s feet, nestling deeper into the ground. The soil quality was not the reason he’d chosen this manor on an uninhabited, remote island. With the right work, this back garden could be nice, but he’ll be out on the sea often enough. It used to be farmland, but Mihawk’s not a farmer; it’s better to leave it to the wildlife than to encroach further, anyway. 

A crow calls in the distance. Mihawk tops off both his and Shanks’s wine glasses, and Shanks leans forward to pick his up, pausing long enough to goad Mihawk into looking down his shirt (even though it’s already, as always, half-open). He’s a terrible flirt, but the worst thing about it is that it works. 

“We can go in soon,” says Shanks. “Let me get some more of this, though.”

Mihawk tilts his hat to better block the angle of the sun, and Shanks reaches out to pat his cheek. He breathes in a scent like fresh grass and the air in mid-spring, after a rain.

“It’s good to know you’re doing well,” says Mihawk.

“Aren’t I always?”

The smile Shanks gives him doesn’t hold as much lightness as he wants it to, but perhaps he knows that with Mihawk, he doesn’t have to try and stretch the truth (though he’s going to do it anyway).

* * *

The first few times, it’s just a glimpse of green like a sprout, pink like a flower amidst the brilliant red of Shanks’s hair, a trick of the light if Mihawk were to doubt his own sight. It vanishes, but Mihawk trusts his senses too much not to file that away in his mind, folded crisply like a new newspaper. And Shanks always smells like a forest, even on a sandy beach, in the middle of the ocean, something earthy and fresh. It’s not the dryness of his straw hat; it’s probably not cologne; it’s--something else.

A devil fruit, maybe, but there’s no point in bringing it up when Shanks doesn’t want to discuss it or to show it off. There’s no point until Shanks brings it up himself, more or less. He starts the bar fight. He throws fists and elbows. He extends rough green stems, all of a sudden, from his leg, like a party trick, like a switchblade, and they’re retracted again just as Mihawk processes the way they’d grabbed an opponent’s foot and tripped them up. Shanks throws a punch at another opponent, and Mihawk dodges a hit and turns, slashing with the dull knife he’d been given to cut his food with. 

The fight is not so difficult as to let that moment slip from the top of his mind, and when they’re done, out of there, Shanks with one hand on his hat and the other still clutching his tankard of ale, Mihawk looks at him again.

There are no vines, no flowers, no roots, no bark on his skin. Nothing about him appears plantlike in that moment. 

“Yes?” says Shanks.

“It’s not a devil fruit, is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Shanks.

His smile’s gone a little less easy. Mihawk sighs. 

“I know what I saw.”

He’s not going to repeat it, just so Shanks can lie and deny, and it’s not like him to be so cagey. He’ll neglect to mention things, pretend to be more scatterbrained than he is, act like the alcohol gets to him easy, but those are always done with a metaphorical wink at anyone who’s caught on and who isn’t looking to be fooled.

“It’s not,” says Shanks. “It’s just me.”

Mihawk nods. That’s fine then.

* * *

Mihawk wakes to a coat of pollen on the sheets, Shanks lying on top of him, still asleep. Clusters of pink flowers sprout like a crown of horns on his head, and the air is thick and heady like an orchard in the middle of the spring. He’s got no flowers of his own to pollinate reciprocally, but he’s got association, memory, the loveliness of Shanks in full bloom in front of him. Shanks’s skin is sticky with sap and sweat, his mouth hot, lips dragging down Mihawk’s neck and chest. Pollen clings to his upper back, sticking to Mihawk’s hands but he can’t avoid touching Shanks, can’t avoid any of it. Wouldn’t. 

He takes Shanks’s cock in to the root, sucks him off until he comes in ribbons of sap, dripping down Mihawk’s mouth until Shanks kisses it off and falls back on top of him--he’ll be ready to go again in twenty minutes, and Mihawk can wait patiently until then, pluck the flowers from his spine and watch him arch his back, feel him lean into the touch. His hip’s at an odd angle; Shanks’s thigh is stuck to his. Another group of flowers pulls free and Shanks sighs, the sound curling into the air like steam in a breeze.

“We can put them in water,” says Shanks. “They’ll keep.”

There are more buds under his hair, like blunt thorns sprouting from his scalp; Mihawk rubs one with his thumb. Shanks pulls his thigh free from Mihawk’s, runs his fingers up Mihawk’s neck, against his earlobe, and Mihawk hisses. 

“Sorry I haven’t gotten you off yet.”

“You don’t sound sorry.”

“Well...I could do something about it, I guess.”

Mihawk snorts, and Shanks kisses him grinding against his thigh, and Mihawk shifts, spreading his legs, for better access that Shanks doesn’t really need and won’t take advantage of anyway--at least for another few seconds. He can’t say they’re not easy for each other.

* * *

When Mihawk knows what to look for, he sees it all the time. There are unfurling leaves mixed with the strands of Shanks’s hair, roots on the bottom of his feet, flowers clustered at the inside of his wrist. Part of it is what Shanks now lets him see, and Mihawk finding himself unable to look away--Shanks soaking his feet in a bowl of fresh water onboard Mihawk’s ship and tiny roots emerging, Shanks pulling a thick stem from his throat, Shanks letting the narrow, bladed leaves stay and fall off the side of his ankle, curling up to meet the sun when Shanks lies sleeping with his hat over his face. He can control it, more or less; he just chooses not to, to let go sometimes. 

The way he lets go is one of the things that makes Mihawk continue to fight him one on one, though he still wins decisively every time--that and the clean clash of sword on sword, the match of movement to movement, the sense of being pushed farther and farther to an edge on flat ground or on an open deck, that as time goes on there is less and less room to make a mistake, to let his feet land wrong and feel it through his boots momentarily instead of paying attention to Shanks, lest he be swiped across the arm, across the face, have the brim of his hat cleaved in two.

But the mistake is not made; Mihawk wins; Shanks gives himself up to instinct, to the moment, to power, and Mihawk has no reservations in doing the same. The risk is there though, wobbling, tangible in the air above where their swords come together.

* * *

Perona pauses in front of the kitchen table. Mihawk takes another sip of wine, waiting for her to move so that he can see what she’s looking at.

“What are these flowers?”

“A keepsake,” says Mihawk.

She steps back, tilting her head to the side, and Mihawk sees them in the bowl, having been arranged by--gravity? The movement of the air? Their own volition?--into a circle around the edge, as fresh as when Shanks had guided Mihawk’s hands into plucking them from his spine. Mihawk thinks of his skin, the openings right above the vertebrae that the next time he’d looked back were closed as if no flowers had never budded and bloomed there. The flowers, cupped in his palm, had been warm from Shanks. They still look as they were then, months later, here in the bowl.

“I didn’t know you were that sentimental,” Perona says, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

Mihawk wouldn’t really say he is, but can he say he’s not?

Is there a difference, besides the way it feels to say it on one’s tongue, between sentimentality and keeping things that make one look periodically backwards? This thought is interrupted by Perona slamming the refrigerator door, and she leaves without another word to him. Mihawk is alone with the flowers, and with his thoughts. They aren’t heavy so much as something he is used to shouldering, to feeling, on occasion. Shanks’s hand, letting the flowers slide into the water, his wet fingertips on Mihawk’s cheek, the smile on his face a dim recreation in Mihawk’s mind. It had been in the morning--but at which time of the year? How had the light come in? How exactly had Shanks’s leaves brushed against his neck?

* * *

Shanks tips a glass of water down his throat, all in one go. Mihawk turns the page of the newspaper. They’ve been out on the sea for nine days now, the middle of nowhere and nothing, alone long enough to get the feeling that they’re almost suspended here, in a dream. They are not quite weightless, not quite untethered; there is the heat of the sun on their faces, the wooden creak in Shanks’s knees, the stiffness in Mihawk’s back from these damn wooden chairs, the steadily-declining reserves of freshwater. 

Shanks leans on his elbow on the deck railing, squinting into the sun and its glare on the water. Mihawk stands at his right, newspaper tucked under one arm, back straight. 

“Just a little longer,” Shanks says.

He turns up his face; his tan is deep, those still-angry scars blurred at the edges, the one leaf mixed into his hair yellowing. He smells more of salt than of anything deciduous.

* * *

“It won’t hurt if you cut them,” says Shanks. 

Gnarled, green-brown stems extend from his chest, the bases blending into his skin or hidden under his shirt, the ends opening and shutting around the air like claws, prehensile. Mihawk unsheathes his knife. The claws--fingers?--stretch toward him as if to grab it; Mihawk spins the knife between his fingers, precise, hacks at the ends as if with a machete. The scent of the sap is sudden and strong; bits of leaf and stem fall shredded to the ground. They’ve regrown while the bits of green still float down near their ankles. 

“Could you hold a sword with it?”

“It’s not strong enough,” says Shanks. “But—”

He opens his arms, sword in one, a dagger in the other--if that’s how he wants to play, then fine. He begins to strike as Mihawk puts away his knife. Pulling out his sword to cleave the claws down the middle just as they reach his chest. Like a hydra, they divide and regrow, bursting from Shanks and wrapping around the air, where Mihawk was or would go. One snakes around his arm like a whip, pulls tight, and Mihawk cuts through it on his way to block Shanks’s stab, turning the blade to stop the dagger, knocking it from Shanks’s hand.

Good, he’s serious (though, about this, when is he not?); the stems are coming faster, and Shanks concentrates more on the sword, the stems almost incidental to them both, though they cause Mihawk to rotate his body, his sword, just a little farther, inching him past where he’s comfortable and certain. He twists his sword, slicing through the nearest tendrils, spinning it fast enough to grind against Shanks’s sharply, the sound like a chainsaw choked with rust, the kind that makes him want to set his jaw and chomp down on air. Shanks draws his sword back, retracting his stems as Mihawk brings his sword down like an axe, chopping clean through the ends. Bits of leaves cling to his blade. Shanks has placed his sword back on his belt. His chest looks, now, only a little green-tinged, as if he’s got a fading bruise there. 

“Draw,” says Mihawk. 

* * *

“I’m thinking of plowing some of it,” says Mihawk.

“Finally getting around to it, huh?” says Shanks. “How many years has it been?”

Mihawk leans back. The armrest of the bench on his side is beginning to rot away at the end, the finish long-neglected, the wood left to moss and mold and water, weeds and vines twisting around its legs. It still holds their combined weights quite well, with only the occasional creak.

Shanks stretches out his legs, his heels carving paths like rivers through the soil. His roots aren’t yet entrenched too deeply to move. In the light of early summer, the back garden looks nice, not bare, not overrun by pests, not thick with plants grown too wild. If he’ll be here most of the summer, it might stay this way. A leaf emerges from behind Shanks’s ear, and another on top of his thumbnail. He reaches over, plucks Mihawk’s hat from his head, and places it on his own, only to turn his face up to the sky. It looks good on him, the way his ridiculous pants always do; the combination should be incongruous but it somehow works, all put together. Shanks catches his eye.

“Bet you’re thinking about how good I look.”

“Yes.”

Shanks’s smile broadens like a clearing. He pats his knees.

“Here, put your feet up.”

Mihawk’s not going to refuse the invitation. He leans tentatively against the armrest, and then relaxes as it doesn’t give. The low sun’s in his face; he’d rather have his hat back, but he’s not going to sit up and steal it from Shanks. He closes his eyes. Somewhere, a seagull calls, closer to the shore. A stem caresses his thumb; Mihawk rubs the unfurling leaf. Shanks scoots closer to him, Mihawk’s pleasant footrest moving under his knees, blocking the light. Mihawk opens his eyes. Shanks grabs the back of the bench and leans down, dropping to a few centimeters above Mihawk’s face. Mihawk doesn’t blink. 

Shanks tastes like good wine, smells like new leaves, fresh flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! (& hbd 2 both shanks & mihawk)


End file.
